1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to systems and methods for comparing and analyzing expenditures and savings over different time periods, and in particular to such systems and methods for comparing and analyzing expenditures and savings for travel-related commodities, such as air travel and hotel accommodation.
2. Related Art
Currently, an organization may spend significant amounts of money on travel-related expenses for its employees, such as air travel and hotel accommodation. Budgetary pressures often require keeping such expenses to a minimum. Accordingly, there is a need to measure and analyze spending and savings so as to identify and quantify factors contributory and detrimental to savings. Armed with knowledge of such factors, an organization may effectively modify its (employees') behavior in terms of spending and consumption so as to improve overall cost performance.
The attempt to minimize expenditures laid out for any given commodity is complicated by the fact that prices and other factors influencing savings (e.g., consumption patterns, exchange rates) often change over time. Accordingly, behavior modification based on an analysis of expenditures and savings pertaining to a single point in time or time period may cease to be effective as the factors influencing savings change over time. Thus, measurement and analysis of spending and savings based on a static methodology tend to be inadequate to achieve optimal savings.
In addition to the problem of developing a dynamic savings methodology, attempts at increasing savings often encounter difficulties in, for example, the following aspects of a savings program: accurately identifying and quantifying the particular factors that are contributing to savings and those that are detracting from savings; providing information about such factors at different levels of detail (e.g., overall corporate consumption vs. consumption of a particular type of commodity); providing recommendations for action (behavior modification) based on the analysis of spending and savings, in a user-friendly format, thereby increasing the likelihood that such recommendations will be acted upon; providing written reports on the analysis and recommendations in an automated and prompt fashion; and comparing the organization's savings performance to that of peers.